While I didn’t love Coup de Chance, I always want to respect my elders, especially those with brilliant comic minds. And while mountains of propaganda have been used to turn the U.S. against Woody Allen, few have done the due diligence to weigh other options such as a scorned woman who manipulates her children to hate their father. If you’d like to debate, please read Apropos of Nothing to prepare. As has been said before, was it ‘right’ to marry her adopted daughter who he never lived with full-time? Of course not, but considering the number of years they’ve been married AND that she wrote an Op-Ed proving she wasn’t being held against her will, I think it’s time to take it down a notch.
Now let’s talk about his 50th film, Coup de Chance. As a pescatarian and middle class lass, I appreciated Woody’s skewering the carnivorous delicacies of hunters and insinuating that wealth does not always equal interesting personality.
I can offer some script doctoring in the dialogue though. His scenes were circular, meaning many conversations were repeated with different wording. We get that the female lead, Lou de Laage, a mediocre actress in my book, is confused about her affair, so we don’t need 3 to 5 scenes with this. We also understand that her Mom becomes suspect of her husband (both very good), so we don’t need this explained over and over again.
Implausibility was a factor as well. I can stretch myself for a movie, but the number of phone conversations you’d want to keep private, in the wide open, were suspect.
Also, where did your sense of humor go Woody? Why not make one of the characters a bit kooky so we laugh along with the
wittiness. I mean just don’t give a pie, give us some a la mode, it’s even French!
But Coup de Chance was still a pleasant way to rest an injured foot and watch an intelligent story. And now I have Herbie Hancock’s Cantaloupe Island in my head, not a bad way to go.
